Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs, the author and main character of the memoir, “Running with Scissors” lived an odd childhood. Burroughs’s mother, a lady of peculiar views, gave his son away to her psychiatrist. What Burroughs’s thought to be an ephemeral amount of time he had to live with this family, turned out to be his whole childhood life. However, this psychiatrist is not one you would normally believe is licensed to help people in emotional distraught. She is obsessed with Santa; her Christmas tree stays up until the end of the summer even though it was of tawdry quality. The doctor’s children are a few patients and a pedophile, who lives in the shed in her backyard. Substances such as Valium were used to ease their lifestyle. Burroughs, at age twelve, had to figure out real life verses fantasy before his life was allayed. He was forced to coalesce with these people who he knew were abnormal and to also come out of the nadir of his life. Also, the way Burroughs explained how he left, it was almost as if his mother exonerated him.